In recent years considerable emphasis has been placed on finding 'ecosystem-based' approaches to fisheries management and multispecies models are seen as crucial for addressing this new agenda. However, there are currently, very few long-term datasets within the European context available for parameterising such models.
DAPSTOM (Integrated Database and Portal for Fish Stomach Records) is an ongoing initiative (supported by Defra and the EU) to digitize and make available fish stomach content records spanning the past 100 years.
The DAPSTOM project was initially financed through the 'data rescue' fund of the EU Network of Excellence "EUROCEANS". The online database contains information (144,919 records) on 104 predator species (most of those occurring in northern European groundfish surveys) and can be searched by predator name or by prey name for given sea areas and years. CSV data files can be outputted containing all records from a particular query. The current database (version 2.5) contains information spanning 1893 - 2009.